Search

The search found 3 results in 0.008 seconds.

Search results

1. Angels, Avatars, and Virtual Ashes

   An audio piece about online memorials.  The voice on the recording is somewhat high-pitched and sped-up, like the exaggerated whine of a self-indulgent preteen girl. As we listen to the voice reading, we realize that it is reciting a list of comments attached to a YouTube video tribute to a young girl who has been murdered. The recording is simultaneously hilarious and disturbing, filled with talk of Angels and “virtual ashes spread across the Web.” Comments like “I miss her. She’s so beautiful in the pics. Who was she?” highlight the absurd and largely shallow nature of death as filtered by the Web, at the same time as the piece somewhat uncomfortably reminds us, even as we laugh at it, that we are part of the same circus too. Caught up in our everyday use of internet-­‐based communication technologies, we may tend to be blind to political and social ramifications that our uses of technology entail. A kind of flattening takes place when discourse transpires on the Web. Activities that we might under normal circumstances consider personal or private, such as mourning, become just another form of information.

   Scott Rettberg - 28.03.2012 - 12:09

2. Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay

   "Thirteen Ways of Killing a Scrubjay" is a prose-poem in the form of a blog that explores the theme of modern violence. The work is a "playful" response to the Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1954). The journal entries detail ludicrously gruesome and elaborate plans to murder the helpless birds: from poison pellets to cyanide darts to water cannons.

   The blog fiction was first published online in 2007. In 2015, it was exhibited at ISEA International. 

   Chelsea Miya - 27.10.2019 - 00:27

3. Ihpil: Láhppon mánáid bestejeaddji

   The blog Ihpil: Láhppon mánáid bestejeaddji was presented as the genuine diary of a 19-year-old, lesbian Sámi girl studying in Tromsø, using the pseudonym Ihpil. The blog starts on her first day as a student in August 2007, and lasts until she drowns in December of that year. Later the blog was published as a print book. In 2010, a journalist discovered that nobody drowned in Tromsø harbour that day, and Sigbjørn Skåden revealed himself to be the author, claiming that he had always intended to do so at some point (see NRK 4 Feb 2011). 

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 06.06.2020 - 07:33